At least someone learned the lessons from the Terminator franchise and decided not to build skynet. No amount of money can save you from Arnold or the T-1000 robot coming back in time to kill you before you enable the robot apocalypse.

I do not understand how thinking punishing domestic AI vendors for not enabling mass surveillance, and believing NSA use of AI for mass surveillance is bad is somehow inconsistent?

AI plus NSA is doubleplusungood

Anthropic's primary objection was the use of the AI for mass surveillance, the second for autonomous drone operations (which it isn't designed for). So you think Hegseth using AI to supercharge the NSA an order of magnitude beyond the Snowden era capabilities is cool? We don't beat China by becoming like China. You know, freedom.

Perhaps a red envelope should be handed to Xi for Chinese New Years with a note from Trump: "We've crippled our capabilities until we get a new AI vendor so feel free to invade Taiwan now while we're busy." The PRC can also feel free to pour military money into AI and chip development and take the lead in the AI race.

Apologies for writing in a living language, but the immigrant/emigrant grammatical distinction isn't a rule so much as a stylistic preference at present. While you're right from an antiquarian perspective (i- vs e- word roots in ancient Greek and Latin signify a direction dramatically), modern language no longer really conforms to these rules. The Merrian webster dictionary argues for the interchangeability of these words in modern English. https://www.quickanddirtytips....

So absolutely true. Some folks who immigrated from India to the US that I have worked with were some of the best developers and tech people I've known. The numerous Indian based outsourcing firms, however, we're never above mediocre. Maybe one person is fairly good but it's always diluted with a sea of clueless newbies who say yes, I understand and have no idea what is going on. The most comical has been seeing non-technical startup founders secure funding, pay an Indian outsourcing company to make their mobile app to save money for marketing, and then either run out of money before launch or end up with a buggy app that needs a complete rewrite. The project always gets bloated midway through and they love expanding scope and charging more when the founders are getting impatient and desperate. This is one reason why VCs (rather than angels who funded these startups) look for technical cofounders, they know better than to make the mistake of fully outsourcing to India.

Many of the items prediction markets allow bets on are just too easy to insider trade. Things like "Who wins the most gold medals in the Olympics," or "who wins this election" are much harder to get a betting advantage with. Will x celebrity meet with x person or mention z thing in a podcast? Those shouldn't even be allowed as bets, because a handful of people know the answer already, or could change scripts to manipulate the answer to the one they've bet on. If this is the first enforcement action, it must mean many people have gotten away with it already. I'd speculate it's to the tune of how many people get hit with a ticket for riding a bicycle on a city sidewalk versus how many actually do it.

The Secretary's position is strategic, not tactic. The tactical mission was a military success. That was orchestrated by military officers. Did it accomplish strategic victory? Considering the next day they were rounding up Venezuelans who supported the op for beatings and confinement, Tren de Aragua has yet to disband, and fentanyl is still flooding the US streets. The current acting president is essentially communist royalty. Hegseth made some content and got bros to squeal "fafo," made some propaganda about us "running" Venezuela...without achieving any of the strategic goals they claimed.

I don't know what "adults in the room" (appeal to authority fallacy?) you reference, but military recruitment numbers were trending upward and in 2024 (fiscal year ending September 2024) all services hit their goals. This is largely attributed to the Future Soldier Preparatory Course in 2022 under Biden. Last year, the Army got nearly one-quarter of its recruits through that program. So this is not a problem that Hegseth has solved. It was solved before he was nominated. He has however managed to purge the ranks of senior generals and officers; along with this contrived fight with Anthropic, leading to headlines about him destabilizing the military: https://www.yahoo.com/news/art...

Hegseth was clearly unqualified to lead anything that has to actually accomplish real goals. As a news anchor he could complain and whine while having no accountability. Now he's in charge, and instead of handling the situation like a normal operator through negotiations and leveraging competition, he just has a tantrum and makes demands..the Trump style. Works on TV on news and the apprentice , but not so well in the real world. That strategy has reached is limit as it's expected power will be neutered after the midterms. It didn't work with Greenland, it's not working with Iran, and it's not working with China. Like many policies of the administration, ultimately this will benefit China. We've already given them access to advanced Nvidia chips for essentially nothing in return, now we'll punish our own AI companies and just hand them the lead in the AI race.

Everything you said is true except I'd argue 50 percent are about vulnerable libraries which have bugs which do not affect the codebase they're used in. Also, now a pentest is being defined as a vulnerability scan by AI; several companies are selling them for just under the price of a human pentest. A real, non-enshittified pentest is harder to come by these days.

I always thought all the Botox and plastic surgery that Lara Trump, Kristi Noem etc got made them look like an alien. Now I see the underlying strategy to gain favor with our new galactic overlords.

https://youtube.com/shorts/RGE...

The point of the site is to serve ads. Slashdot shows me some of the trashiest, scammiest ads of all the sites I visit. I frequently see "hint app" which will sell you a "soulmate psychic sketch" and rip you off with rebills if you're foolish enough to sign up; ads for Mad Muscles Tai Chi (another well known scammy rebill), and various far-right coded t-shirts (1776 anyone?). Do you think people who run ads like this care about quality? The only leads who convert on these are patently fools!